Acrophobia
by nachalainne
Summary: ac·ro·pho·bi·a  ak-ruh-foh-bee-uh noun: a pathological fear of heights.


"Anderson mentioned it might be important. You know, you two might get on if you could just stop bickering like schoolboys for five minutes. You're very similar-"

But Sherlock wasn't listening. He'd tuned Lestrade out right around the moment the older man paid for lunch, and handed Sherlock a kebab. Instead, he was wolfing down the first meal he'd had in two days, and contemplating the respective heights of the Citigroup Centre skyscrapers that loomed overhead.

He turned around quickly, and Lestrade stopped. He knew that look.

"Alright, what is it?" Greg asked.

Sherlock didn't answer - his eyes followed an invisible line across the road and up to the glass entrance of one of the bank buildings. Lestrade rolled his eyes.

"I can see you deducing," he called out. "You may as well tell me."

Sherlock hushed him flippantly and circled around a mysterious shrub. Greg made a face, and regretted it as an older gentleman with the look of a gardener or local groundskeeper glared angrily at him.

"Yeah, Sherlock, you might want to-" Sherlock ripped off a chunk of the plant and held it aloft. The gardener let out a loud shout. "Sherlock! Sorry! Sorry."

"Kidnapping," Sherlock muttered, turning the leaves over slowly. The man whose dainty shrub he'd just shredded advanced, holding up a mulch rake.

"Excuse me?" Greg fished out his badge and held it out for the gardener - to prevent murder, if nothing else. "Just hang on a sec. Sherlock, what did you just say?"

But the young consulting detective was off like a rocket. He'd looked up from his leaves for half a second, focused on the building right in front of them, and sprinted to the entrance, leaving Greg behind to mop up the mess.

But Greg wasn't the type of man to be left behind when there was a serious crime happening. "Sorry!" He called out again to the irate groundskeeper, and hurried after Sherlock. The bratty younger detective was bloody lucky that Lestrade was on his heels, flashing his badge at the security team stationed at the entrance as they tore through the lobby.

Sherlock stopped on a dime, spinning around as his eyes darted from one clue to the next, reading the dust in the air like carefully tagged crime scene. Lestrade blitzed past him, his shoes squeaking on the tile as he struggled to turn around. He couldn't see anything that Sherlock could - not a bloody hint of whatever nefarious deed had happened to put Sherlock in such a rash, but focused state of excitement.

"I swear to god, if this turns out to be a bloody budgie-"

"It's a child," Sherlock called over his shoulder, voice full of hise usual acerbic snap as he took off again. "A small boy- weren't you paying attention?" And like an obedient police dog, Greg followed - chasing him across the wide entrance, and straight to the- Greg broke away, and ran for the stairs. "What floor?" He demanded.

Sherlock rolled his eyes, jabbing the up button on the lift. "You won't have time," he answered. "You'll have to come with me."

"Just tell me the bloody floor!"

But the lift had already arrived. Sherlock stepped back as a man with a mail cart stepped out, but held his arm across the doors to keep them from closing. "Lestrade!" But the look on his face was more effective than shouting - it said very clearly that he was more than willing to leave Greg there if necessary.

He would go on ahead, and face however many kidnappers there were all on his own.

Greg took a short, sharp breath.

And then he was inside the lift, pressed against the back wall with both hands clutching the railing as hard as he possibly could. Not that it would do him any good. If the whole thing plummeted however many floors were underneath them- his face went ashen and he closed his eyes.

Sherlock hit the highest number on the panel and waited. There was a very brief pause after the doors closed, but then they were moving - and fast. Rising up, floor by floor, while Sherlock impatiently tapped his foot, and Greg hummed something Sherlock didn't recognise. Not long after, it was obvious that Greg had abandoned his punk rock gods to pray to one infinitely more popular.

Sherlock smirked.

And then the doors were open, and Greg leapt past him. If Sherlock had been watching, he'd have seen that at no point in the older detective's exit did his feet actually touch the floor. He simply vaulted from his corner, straight out of the elevator, and on to moderately more solid ground.

And then they were running again - just to the stairs, but up, up that final flight to the door that led to the roof. Sherlock shouldered it open roughly, and Greg pushed past him - determined to be the first on the scene, just in case. He already regretted not calling for back-up, but there just hadn't been time. There never was with Sherlock. It was kebabs one minute, and a bloody rooftop kidnapping the next.

Or it should have been - but the roof was empty.

Greg spun around, searching for the elusive criminals. "What happened? Where are they?"

Sherlock had dropped his "Shut up, I'm deducing" face and loitered by the door.

"Sherlock?"

The young detective looked around briefly. "No kidnappers?" He clicked his tongue. "Must have gotten the wrong building. Was that really the first time you've ever been in a lift?"

Lestrade had stopped pacing. He stood stone-still in the middle of the roof, staring at Sherlock. "What do you mean 'wrong building'?" he asked very slowly.

Sherlock shrugged. "Probably wasn't a kidnapping at all. Just bad gardening. My mother does better trimming..."

Lestrade ran both hands through his grey hair. The boyish charisma that he carried with him everywhere had vanished.

"Fifty stories," Sherlock added, pulling away from the wall and walking out to him. "Tallest building in London! Has been for more than a decade. There's a political conspiracy, of course. Mycroft's hand, as-" Greg's clenched fist smashed into his cheekbone, and Sherlock went sprawling to the ground.

But the Scotland Yard detective wasn't finished with him. Greg grabbed Sherlock by the collar of his shirt and jacket, and hauled him up roughly. It wasn't hard - Sherlock was taller, but he was a featherweight by comparison. Greg lifted him like a helpless kitten - and slammed him forcefully against the door they'd come through. He was absolutely livid. The anger burned in his seething glare; the betrayal in his stiff shoulders as he struggled not to throttle Sherlock on the spot.

"You little-" He closed his mouth firmly and took a deep breath through his nose, never taking his eyes off Sherlock. "That was a trick?" He asked, voice harsh.

Sherlock Holmes was very rarely at a loss for words. Even then, he found something to say - but it took him longer than he would ever care to admit to understand what had just happened. His face was throbbing - if he didn't know better, he'd have assumed his zygomatic bone had fractured. It was certainly bruised.

"I wanted to know if you would use a lift," he answered plainly.

"So you tricked- you bloody invented a crime to get me up to the-" Unlike Sherlock, Greg was finding it very difficult to put his rage into words. "The fucking roof, Sherlock!" He shouted in the younger man's face, slamming him against the door again.

"It was a test-"

"No!" Greg stepped away from him very quickly, running his hands through his hair again. If he stayed close to Sherlock, he was going to deliver another round of very painful corporal punishment. "You do not ever!" He yelled bitterly. "Ever! Try to test me like this again. I am not one of your games. I'm not an experiment!"

Sherlock didn't say anything at all.

Greg stopped moving and closed his eyes, covering his face with both hands as he tried to reign in his fury. He couldn't - his heart was hammering in his chest. He was still on the bloody roof of a fifty story skyscraper in the middle of fucking London! He clenched his fists, visibly fighting the urge to be sick.

Sherlock straightened up slowly. His eyes never left Lestrade at any point.

Lestrade was seeing red - and, quite frankly, a lot of wibbly green. He did his best to take a deep, calming breath, and walked towards the door. He was desperate to keep his eyes on the concrete under his feet, but even the knowledge that he was on the roof made his head swim.

He stopped when he could reach out and grab the handle. Sherlock was standing just to his left, still impassively observing, as he so often did. Greg looked up for a brief moment, if only to fix the childish asshole that had dragged him up there with the most sincere, angry glower he could manage. "Don't bloody call me," he insisted, enunciating every word. "I will let you know when I'm willing to talk to you again."

And then he left. He pulled the door open, and slowly descended the stairs - not just for one flight, but for the hundreds of steps that stood between him and the unmoving, sea-level ground at the bottom. He never stopped - not at any point during his long, nightmarish descent. He just carried on, all the way to lobby. Sherlock left the building long before he did - he'd grabbed the lift, because unlike Greg, he didn't have a debilitating fear of heights - but he didn't stick around and wait for him. It was good - if Greg had seen him again, no matter how long the younger man had waited, he'd still have punched him right in the bloody mouth all over again.

Some mistakes took a lot of time to get over - and Sherlock Holmes was very, very lucky that Greg Lestrade was a forgiving man.


End file.
